Human beings, unlike planets, molecules or amoebas, think and act for reasons. However, the cognitive appropriation of these reasons goes beyond any empirical description of people’s thinking or acting; it takes us to the territory of normativity, away from the objectivity of empirical descriptions. This idiosyncratic feature of human beings poses a dilemma for the sciences which are concerned wit
h them, i.e the social sciences: Either the social sciences are less objective and hence inferior in comparison with the natural sciences or the social world is stripped of normative content. If we side with the first horn of the dilemma, we will have to conclude that the social sciences cannot reach the status of the natural sciences. If we choose the second horn, we will be forced to conclude that the image of humans as rational beings characterized by freedom and responsibility is, strictly speaking, illusionary. In order to carry out this task we plan to do the following: 1) Identify the central assumption which generates the dilemma. 2) Construct a philosophical account which retains both the image of the social sciences as proper sciences and the autonomy of the normative realm. To do this we address the problem of normativity – the interaction of reasons with the natural-causal order – in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science and the philosophy of action. Finally, we plan to: 3) Provide a case study which illustrates the sustainability of the proposed account. We will study the case of opinion polls in political science, in order to show how this phenomenon (i.e. opinion polling) should be understood as a description of social reality under some circumstances (and thus as an instantiation of the practice of an empirical science (i.e. political science)) and as the manipulation of public opinion (and thus as an intentional action) under other circumstances. Research Team: Thodoris Dimitrakos (Principal Investigator), Evgenia Mylonaki (Researcher), Nikos Folinas (Researcher), Maria Mourtou-Paradeisopoulou (Researcher)
Key areas of research: Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Action, Political Science and Political Theory
Funding:
The research project is implemented in the framework of H.F.R.I call “Basic research Financing (Horizontal support of all Sciences)” under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan “Greece 2.0” funded by the European Union –NextGenerationEU (H.F.R.I. Project Number: 16362).
